Week 9, Things #20, #21, #22, and #23

I do like the "Introducing the Book" video, and I think that middle school students might think that it's funny. At a workshop recently I was introduced to the book trailers that publishers have put on Youtube, and our public librarian planned to use them to promote the summer reading program for teens. There is a wide variety available. In addition, I hope to incorporate book trailers into plans for a Library club next year. With a few Flip videos I think that the kids would have a lot of fun and might come up with some interesting projects. The next step will be to partner with a teacher to offer the book trailer as an alternative book report option. Here is a sample for The Hunger Games:


The variety of podcasts available is pretty incredible. Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me is one of my favorite radio shows, and I often miss it, so it will be good to have the RSS feed here. When we convert to Follett Destiny in the fall, I hope to have students create podcasts for book reviews and upload them to the library catalog. It might also be fun to have a weekly podcast on the library web page of "What's new in the library this week," or even a way to promote the monthly trivia contest. I will take a look at the podcast tutorial this summer.

LibriVox is a cool idea, but I didn't come up with any hits for the middle school level titles that I searched. Still, it may be worth a try to find materials for vision-impaired students.

I didn't expect to like ebooks much, as I had only tried those in plain text format. Several of those available in American Libraries used page turning, which I absolutely loved, especially for the illustrated children's books. The variety of texts available at worldbookfair.org is incredible, especially for $8.95 a year! I thought that the featured bird book was the ultimate ebook, until I looked at the British Library's online gallery. Every offering there leaves me speechless.

The web sites about Creative Commons and fair use were enlightening. The Stanford site provides one of the clearest definitions of copyright and fair use that I have ever seen. I did find a fair use of the CSLA Learning 2.0 site at Northwest Region OELMA members, but the planning and execution of the original site is so much more sophisticated that it makes it clear that "fair use" doesn't necessarily result in expansion or even replication.